Sound Common Sense Research Articles

The Citizen, a Study of the Individual and the Government

PROF. SHALER, who is professor of geology at Harvard, has set before himself the practical and unambitious task of instructing the youth of the United States in the first principles of citizenship. In this he has succeeded; his work is interesting, suggestive, and extremely sensible. Not being written for the specialist, it is hardly to be called profound; and the theoretical considerations which are brought forward are of the simplest. But the author's sound common sense generally carries the reader with it. A favourable specimen of his mode of argument may be found in the discussion of woman's suffrage. There is no reference to the various views held by thinkers from Plato downwards; but probably Prof. Shaler's one-page argument is quite sufficient, that women, owing to their usually secluded lives, are not fitted in the same way as men to form judgments on political questions, but that, after all, if a majority of women should desire to vote, it would probably be best to give them the franchise, for the reason that it is most undesirable to have any considerable body of the people in a discontented state.

THE PATHOLOGY THAT REMAINS AFTER THE NON-SURGICAL TREATMENT OF PERITONITIS.

Faithful followers of the teachings of rational medicine believe that actual disease within the abdomen, as in other parts of the body, always means a pathology, the removal or correction of which is essential to the restoration of normal health; and that the efficiency of any treatment for disease in this region, as elsewhere, should be estimated chiefly by the effect it has in removing or modifying the pathology which produces the symptoms. In the management of peritonitis, where the morbid processes are concealed beneath a rigid or distended abdomen, there are many temptations to lure us from these teachings; and doubtless at times we all find ourselves reading, discussing, or perhaps practicing treatments which, in the light of the revelations of the modern operating-room, we must know are contrary to sound surgical principles and common sense. I believe that we are especially prone to fall into these errors in our

XIII.—“Thinges Nedefull for this Present State” by John Mountgomery, 1562

The little MS. volume, which has been laid before the Society by Mr. Aucher Taylor, is “a short treatise concerning things needful for this present state,” by John Mountgomery, of London, 1562. It is a good specimen of the political pamphlet of the time, and contains much that commends itself to us as sound common sense, while some of the writer's views bring with them more amusement than conviction. As a scheme for the better defence of the realm it serves to illustrate the popular ideas upon internal military matters at a time when standing armies were unheard of, and when the long-bow was still a rival of the new “fiery weapons ”; while there are many remarks in its pages, pointing to shortcomings in national character, which might be as truly applied to us at the present time as they were to our forefathers in the days of Elizabeth.